Public Wi-Fi networks are still insecure as ever

European police agency Europol warns internet users again that using free Wi-Fi hotspots poses a data risk and that sensitive information
can be lost or stolen by potential hackers that are located in the same hotspot.

Troels Oerting, head of Europol's cybercrime centre, told BBC News that a growing number of attacks are being carried out via public
Wi-Fi service and that people should send personal data only across trusted networks.

"We have seen a growing increase in the misuse of Wi-Fi hotspots and the issue is getting worse, in order to steal information,
identity or passwords and money from the users who use public or insecure Wi-Fi connections," he added.

The problems posed by using insecure Wi-Fi have been known for many years, and underscore the important need to use a VPN connection
when accessing the internet from insecure public places such as cafes, transport hubs and conference venues.

But consumers often ignore these best practices, putting them at increased risk of getting hacked as a result. Sean Sullivan, security
advisor at anti-virus firm F-Secure, commented-- "This has been a concern for many years, and that's why sensible companies force employees
to use VPN connections. A Firefox plugin called 'Firesheep' definitively demonstrated just how utterly insecure Wi-Fi hotspots can be
back in 2010."

Sullivan added that he used open hotspots all the time but always took care to take basic security precautions when he did. "If you want
to use an open Wi-Fi hotspot to search for the latest sports scores, then go for it. But if you want to check your bank balance, read your
email, have a private chat with your friends, then get yourself a VPN service,” he concluded.

According to a recent Kaspersky Lab survey, 34 percent of people using a PC admitted to taking no special measures to protect their
online activity when using a Wi-Fi hotspot.

Only about 12.6 percent of internet users take the time to actively check the encryption standards of any access point before they
use it, and that number is extremely low, considering all the risks that are involved.

The Kaspersky Lab survey does offer some comfort to those concerned about consumer attitudes to internet security. Only one in
seven of those quizzed were comfortable banking or shopping online while connected to an untrusted Wi-Fi hotspot.

And in a related development, privacy groups such as the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) have teamed up with technology firms
such as Twitter and privacy-focused search service DuckDuckGo to create a new campaign to improve data security for consumers in a post-Snowden
world of dragnet surveillance.

The 'Encrypt all Things' campaign has drawn up a seven point Data Security Action Plan for 2014 specifically designed to promote
better data protection practices by websites and the technology industry, as well as promoting greater security awareness about privacy-enhancing
technologies among consumers.

In other internet security news

Internet security consultants are suggesting that Canadian businesses and the federal government should adopt a just-released
U.S. government framework for tightening IT security of critical infrastructure, and by adding additional layers of security to
improve the confidentiality of all saved data.

“I honestly don’t think that we should re-invent the wheel,” said Kevvie Fowler, a partner in the forensic advisory services at
KMPG Canada.“

Fowler said that the guidelines were released February 12 by the federal National Information Technology Laboratory (NIST). “If
you look at what has been done, it already leverages several concepts from internationally-adopted standards like ISO 27001/2 and a
few others,” he added.

In 2010, the Harper government announced a national strategy to better protect critical infrastructure calling for the public and
private sectors to work on addressing risks. But two years later, the Auditor General released a report complaining the strategy still
didn’t have an action plan. That plan has since been completed.

Public Safety Canada has released a guideline of best practices for incident response. But Fowler said the NIST document goes further.
Meanwhile, as part of its effort to work on an infrastructure security plan, the Canadian government is holding an invitation-only
conference in New York next week.

Called a ``Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure`` it’s aimed at organizations, regulators and consumers to create or
improve cybersecurity programs.

The document provides a common language to address and manage cyber risk in a cost-effective way based on business needs, without
placing additional regulatory requirements on businesses, NIST says.

“The framework provides a consensus description of what’s needed for a comprehensive cybersecurity program,” said under secretary of commerce for
Standards and Technology and NIST director Patrick Gallagher.

“Additionally, it reflects the efforts of a broad range of industries that see the value and need for improving cybersecurity
and lowering overall risk. It will help companies prove to themselves and their stakeholders that good cybersecurity is good business.”

In short, it’s a series of best practices. The Harper government has been criticized for not providing leadership on cyberthreats
to Canadian enterprises and citizens by an academic who specializes in international security.

A group of Canadian IT security professionals hopes to officially set up a national computer emergency response team (CERT) network
next month that will run round the clock.

NIST says that several organizations can use the framework to determine their current level of IT security, set goals and establish
a plan for improving or maintaining their cybersecurity.

It also offers a methodology to protect privacy and civil liberties (according to current U.S. law) to help organizations incorporate
those protections into a comprehensive cybersecurity program.

Within the framework, which will be updated periodically, there are three main elements-- the core, tiers and profiles. The core
presents five functions-— identify, protect, detect, respond and recover, that taken together, allow any organization to understand
and shape its cybersecurity program.

The tiers describe the degree to which an organization’s cybersecurity risk management meets goals set out in the framework. The profiles
help organizations move from a current level of cybersecurity sophistication to a target improved state that meets business needs.

In other internet security news

According to an industry warning from systems integrator Accuvant, more and more today, sophisticated hackers and well organized cybercriminals are
increasingly carrying out DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks as a complex method in cover up their criminal activities, while trying to hide their
ugly tracks. And the situation is starting to be really alarming says Accuvant, an internet security firm that researches advanced threats, methods and IT architectures.

Increasingly available automated DDoS attack toolkits provide cybercriminals an easy way to tie up system resources and often disrupt busy IT teams who
are dispatched to remedy the issue and then get critical applications back online.

Attackers are increasingly using DDoS as a cover up, warned Craig Treubig, managing principal consultant at Accuvant. "These events cost organizations
large sums of money in the form of service-level agreements, service interruptions, and credit protection for clients affected by an attack against
the enterprise," Treubig wrote in his recent analysis of the threats.

And those attacks can be very costly to unprepared businesses, Treubig added. Expenses for an initial attack begins at $100,000 and the costs add up
per hour during mitigation until the attack is fully resolved, he said.

Experts have documented the largest distributed denial of service attack ever seen earlier this week, with the volume coming in at 400 Gbps at
its peak. Matthew Prince of website hosting provider CloudFlare said the attack was reported Monday and involved more than 4,500 servers in what is
called a Network Time Protocol (NTP) server amplification attack.

It is one in a series of high-profile DDoS attacks conducted against U.S. banks and a large 300-Gbps attack last year against Spamhaus, a nonprofit
antispam blacklist provider. The alleged attacker in the Spamhaus DDoS campaign has since been apprehended by authorities.

Prince said he is optimistic that network operators will address the infected NTP servers used in the latest attack. Worse, he clearly warned that the latest
attack technique could theoretically be amplified to greater peak volume.

Accuvant's Treubig said that government agencies, businesses in the oil and gas industry, manufacturers, health-care organizations and higher education
may be at increased risk for more-complex blended denial of service attacks. The industries are often pursued for their intellectual property or
research information, Treubig said.

Solution providers say that they have been working with clients on ways to ensure they are prepared for denial of service attacks. Appliances such as
firewalls often are not properly configured to handle a DDoS attack, despite having capabilities to filter out malicious traffic, the said.

Additionally, most clients are concerned about system availability, not an underlying cyberattack associated with the denial of service activity. But in 2013,
Dell Secureworks published a report documenting ACH fraud at some banks and credit unions tied to DDoS attacks. In one attack, cybercriminals fraudulently
transferred $2.1 million from a bank account. The transfers often go to banks located in Russia, Cyprus and China.

In a recent interview, researchers at Burlington, Mass.-based DDoS protection vendor Arbor Networks said they were tracking the rising number of
sophisticated application-layer DDoS attacks. Some businesses rely on their upstream ISPs for protection, but that can often result in some disruption,
they said.

The company issued recommendations to network operators this week to help reduce the threat posed by amplification attacks. "Network operators,
including the various categories of ISPs as well as enterprise network operators, should routinely scan their IP address space for insecurely configured
services that can be abused by attackers, and then work to notify the operators of such services and remediate them," the company said about the latest
high-profile attack.

According to some reports, unnamed officials told The New York Times that Edward Snowden used a common web crawler program to
scrape NSA's systems and steal secret and classified documents.

It's a revelation that raises even more questions about the efficiency of the agency's internal security measures. The software in
question was not named by the officials, but it's apparently similar to Googlebot, the program the search giant created several years ago
to index new Web pages.

Snowden also used a program called "wget" which Chelsea Manning used to download the batches of secret files that were published
by WikiLeaks several years back.

The crawler can be programmed with various search phrases. It then travels automatically from web page to web page, following links,
and going ever deeper in search of relevant and secret documents.

"One of the many questions I have is, while people can access individual messages related to their specific job, shouldn't
this system have caught someone downloading 500,000 messages and asked him, 'What are you doing?'" said Senator-Elect Mark Kirk (R-Ill.).

Similar questions are currently being asked of the NSA's overall systems as well. And it's a weighty issue given that, as the
Times notes, the NSA is also charged with maintaining U.S. cybersecurity against foreign adversaries that are supposedly using far
more sophisticated methods than Snowden apparently did.

A presidential directive made in response to the 2010 Manning/WikiLeaks incident required U.S. government facilities to install
updated anti-leak software.

But the facility in Hawaii where Snowden worked as an NSA contractor reportedly hadn't updated the "insider threat" program
simply because the outpost's network didn't yet have enough power to run it properly.

Today's Times story says it's not known if Snowden got lucky in landing at the Hawaii facility, or if he sought it out. NSA officials
told the Times that Snowden would've been caught if he'd been working at the agency's headquarters in Fort Meade, Md.

Agency culture was a factor as well, the Times reports. "Once you are inside, the assumption is that you are supposed to be there,
like in most organizations," Richard Bejtlich, chief security strategist for Silicon Valley computer security firm FireEye, told
the paper.

"But that doesn't explain why they weren't more vigilant about excessive activity in the system," he added. The Times said, "The
NSA declined to comment on its investigation or the security changes it has made since the Snowden disclosures. Other intelligence
officials familiar with the findings of the investigations under way -- there are at least four -- were granted anonymity to discuss
the investigations."

And Snowden told the paper in a statement-- "It's ironic that officials are giving classified information to journalists in an
effort to discredit me for giving classified information to journalists. The difference is that I did so to inform the public about
the government's actions, and they're doing so to misinform the public about mine."

The Times reported earlier that the CIA suspected Snowden of trying to get his hands on classified files when he worked
for the agency in 2009, but Snowden says that report was inaccurate.

In other internet security news

Ask any good network manager or IT system admin that fully understand the risks of their business and they will tell you that one of the best
ways of opening up the proverbial 'can of worms' is to first publish an innocuous app that works well, and then push out an update with something
major changed with the app's initial permissions, says Ryan Smith.

And Smith should know-- he's the lead internet security and threat engineer at Mojave Networks, a company that provides advanced
mobile security for customers around the globe ranging from medium-size enterprises to Fortune 500 companies and the U.S. Army.

To protect against the sort of threat mentioned above, system admins need to look more closely at the permissions set on mobile app
updates. "It makes sense if you are not comfortable with the permissions to simply uninstall the app, added Smith."

In today's modern world, laptops, smartphones and tablets have become really ubiquitous and so convenient that users often download
apps and automatically approve permissions without giving them any thought.

Such routine behavior exposes personal and other sensitive data that users store on their prized devices to increasing risk.

Such a blind trust is just what app makers count on. Android users, especially, are complacent about synchronizing apps on multiple
devices.

Even worse is the practice of linking bank and social networking accounts with cloud storage so that a conduit is always open
that connects our data to phones, tablets and computers.

Personal and sensititive corporate information can leak from mobile phones and tablets through the apps we install. Many of the
apps we use mine our contact lists, locations and personal information that the app makers sell or use for marketing campaigns.

"For some mobile app developers, gathering and selling user information is half of the business model," says Rick Sizemore, Director
of the cloud computing practice at Alsbridge, a benchmarking firm that analyzes complex enterprise IT systems.

The potential for hacking sensitive and corporate information is much, much higher when portable devices such as iPhones, Blackberries and
tablets are used in enterprise settings.

Overall, encrypting the data is helpful, but many workplaces lack adequate IT support to make smartphones and tablets more secure,
according to Sizemore.

In any case, "those measures will not prevent individual apps from collecting personal information and sending it to the vendors'
server. That situation is what we call the Wild, Wild West of mobile devices. With Google Android devices, it's even more of a Wild
West situation," he added.

Users need to realize and fully understand that with many of the apps on their devices, all the information they store on the devices,
including every place they go is collected and sent by more than one app, warned Sizemore.